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The Price of Dying

“I want to be interred after I die,” Mr. Peters said. He made that clear to his family while he was still lucid, before old age and illness rendered him unintelligible. Seventy wasn’t that old, but he recognized the symptoms that were creeping up on his ailing body – the aches, the fatigue, the feeling of helplessness and despair. Despite his daughter’s attempts to assuage his concerns, he sensed his own mortality.

The worst part about dying, Mr. Peters thought, was what happened afterwards. Even since he was a small boy, he had been afraid of fire. He could never forget the scorching heat of the orange flames searing his skin, the dark billowing smoke entering his nostrils. The time that his house burned down, the fire almost took him with it. How ironic then, to escape the fire only to be fed into it after death.

So one day, he sat his son and daughter down after dinner. “I want to be buried whole,” he said, emphasizing the “whole”. “I do not want to be cremated. After I die, put my body in a coffin and lower it into the ground. As simple as that.”

Mr. Peters waved her away with his hand. “Everybody dies sooner or later. I’m letting you know now so you can start preparing. No cremation. Understood?”

Lucy and his son John nodded their heads.

“Good,” Mr. Peters said. He stood up from his chair and made for the door. Suddenly, there was a stabbing pain in his chest. He groped for the back of his chair blindly, but failed, and collapsed onto the floor.

Within hours, Mr. Peters was dead.

If Mr. Peters was right about the inevitability of death, he was wrong about the simplicity of a burial. In the seventy years he had lived, more people had died and were buried while the land mass had stayed the same.

This was something Lucy Peters Green understood. It was with trepidation that she dialed the numbers of the cemeteries in the city, and her fear was realized when the caretakers told her that all the cemetery plots were full.

Lucy hung up. She then proceeded to call the cemeteries outside the city. They were all but full too, with only a few plots available. Lucy bought a plot with her meager earnings despite its exorbitant price. A simple service was held, and the coffin that held the body of Mr. Peters was lowered into the ground and covered with soil. A tombstone was erected, and before she left, Lucy placed a wreath of yellow carnations on his grave. They were his favorite flowers.

*

Who knew that it would be more expensive to die as time went on? But it makes sense, if you think about it.

*

“Bury me…” the old man mumbled in his delirium. “…in the ground…I’m burning…”

His wife, his children, his grandchildren and two nurses scurried about him, applying cold compresses, squeezing his hand. To no avail. There was nothing they could do to bring old Mr. Scott out of his delirium.

“What to do…what to do,” muttered old Mrs. Scott as she squeezed her husband’s hand. “He wants to be buried, but that’s not possible…”

“Mom, we’ll have to cremate him. That’s the only option,” their son replied. “There is no more space. No one has been buried for years.”

Just then, the old man’s eyes popped open. His family gasped and all leaned towards the bed, anxious and eager at the same time.

“When I die…” the old man whispered in a moment of lucidity, “bury me in the ground, where I’ll be safe from the flames. Bury me whole…do not burn me…leave me in peace…” With that, Mr. Scott again fell into his delirium.

His wife and son looked at each other. “He has spoken,” she whispered.

Charlie Scott sighed. “Yes, Mom. We’ll figure something out.” He glanced at the body of his father ruefully. Seeing the gaunt face, outline of the bones stretching his paper-thin skin, the beads of sweat trickling down the face of the man he loved so dearly, Charlie knew that something had to be done.

The caretaker led Charlie through rows and rows of graves, pausing here and there to assess their potential. Finally, he came to a stop in front of a sandstone marker. It was full of scratches, but Charlie managed to discern the name. Jonathan Peters,1950–2020.

2020, Charlie thought, that was the year his father was born.

“No one visits this grave because the man has no living descendants,” the caretaker said.

Charlie paused to examine the spot. Weeds poked out from the soil, and a rotten stench wafted towards him from somewhere nearby. But it was the best he could do.

“Alright,” he said, and handed the caretaker the check. “You get the other half of the payment after this deal is completed.”

The caretaker nodded. A date and time was arranged.

After the caretaker went off, Charlie stood at the spot for a while longer. It was sad, he thought, how money could only buy this dilapidated plot in a cemetery in the middle of nowhere. He shook his head. If he were richer…

*

The caretaker felt exhilaration and guilt at the same time. Exhilaration, because in his hand he held a check that contained more money than he had earned in a lifetime. Yet, he could not gaze at the coffin of Mr. Peters without a sense of pity. Poor man, he thought. It was too bad his children died without having children of their own. In this day and age, it was essential to have someone to guard the grave.

As he stood there wondering what to do, he suddenly hit upon a solution. With his newly earned money, he had Mr. Peters’ body cremated and scattered the ashes in the river. It was only the right way to pay respect to the body, he thought, satisfied with himself.

With his conscience clear, he bought a car, a brand new Ferrari, and drove it home to show his family.

I saw you walking past from the window and my heart almost burst. I don’t remember which part of you I recognized first: your face, with your combination of sleek cheekbones and nerdy glasses, or your green jacket, or the way you walked in a sort of funny but still dignified way. But I recognized you, as I always did.

I hadn’t seen you for so long that I stared in disbelief, the moment hanging in suspension. The fork didn’t make it to my mouth. I didn’t have time to reach for my phone before you disappeared from view. What could I have said anyway? I would have said a lot of things, but none of them would have interested you.

You walked past. I finished the last mouthful of cake. From your past habits, I knew you were heading to town for dinner. The thought of waiting for you to finish dinner and walk back the same way crossed my mind. I told myself it was stupid, but that didn’t stop me from sitting at the table long after there was nothing left in my mouth.

Questions:-What did you feel after reading the piece, if anything?-Is there enough in the piece to give you a sense of the nature of the relationship? Did you get an idea of the scenario/setting? -What did you think of the length? Is there anything you think I should include/clarify or anything I should cut?-Any other comments/suggestions?

We used to talk about many things, but since a few weeks ago our conversations have dwindled to asking each other about our respective love lives and doling out relationship advice, usually on my part. Not that I would know; I have never been in an official relationship, although I’ve been in several sort-of ones. But I guess that’s the consultant coming out in me.

You’ve always told me to follow my dreams, whatever those are. When people ask me about what I want to do in the future, my official answer is still “I don’t know”, as it has been for years. The truth is, I do know: I want to compose musicals. Except it sounds so much more far-fetched than consulting or banking, or public policy or developmental economics. It shall remain my little secret until I make it big, or it’ll wither away, unbeknownst to most people. To them, I’m just another Chinese kid studying economics, albeit with more musical talent and an unusual fondness for theatre (especially musical theatre; I love musicals the way you love good food).

After the third time you told me to “follow your dreams” (or the fourth time, I didn’t count), I asked you if working at an investment bank was your dream. You said you were still figuring it out. It certainly sounded glamorous when you told me you were out in a bar “with some other bankers”. It sounded like the life you told me you wanted. When you took me to the Bund that night in June, you pointed out to me in mock eloquence of how the Bund was ablaze with lights and the city abuzz with energy. The banks and skyscrapers and bars and restaurants along Zhongshan Road and the Huangpu River – these were places where the rich went to work and afterwards to have a good time. You pointed to a tall curved building across the river, brightly lit. That was where you were going to start working next week, at Morgan Stanley.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” you murmured.

“Not bad.” It was a handsome building at night. (But the following week, when you showed me the view from a vice president’s office window, I was disgusted by the gray mess of buildings and roads and cars.)

As we crossed the street to head back to the subway station, you asked me if I could live without the bars and the good restaurants. It was meant to be rhetorical, but I answered yes, I could. You wouldn’t believe me at first.

“Imagine marrying someone rich. You wouldn’t have to work and you can go to bars and good restaurants and parties for the rest of your life.”

“Not for the rest of my life. A year, maybe. Then I’d get bored. I would have no purpose in life.”

You shook your head, still skeptical. “The world is materialistic. That’s how life is. When you get older you’ll understand.”

Sometimes you can be condescending like that, which I choose to accept. After all, you are a grade above me but almost three years older. I look up to you, at how popular and easy-going you are, at how you completed a challenging finance program a year ahead of most students. I used to envy the way you could be at your internship during the day and go out with friends at night, a different group of friends each day of the week. I had never fully grasped the meaning of “work hard, play hard” until I met you. But then, this was before Morgan Stanley.

After you started the second internship of the summer, our conversations started getting shorter. You started sending me messages at 8 pm my time and 10:30 pm your time saying you “just get home.” This phrase made the list of things you tell me most often, along with “follow your dreams” and “went to the bar with my friends”. In fact, I almost came to expect this message at 8 pm every other night. If you didn’t get home at 10:30, you were usually out at a bar or KTV with your fellow bankers, and I’d receive a message an hour later about a girl who was hitting on you.

“Is she cute?” I would ask, although after all the discussions we had about our love lives, I was hardly interested anymore.

“She’s okay,” you’d reply. “Not interested. Too much work.”

Last night, you told me you were exhausted from work. I wasn’t at all surprised; you told me this pretty often too, “so tired,” or “had a bad day.” But then you told me you met your “best friend for life” last night, the one you had been trying to move on from for four years, the reason for an evening of advice from me two weeks earlier.

“How did it go?”

“I wasn’t interested in her anymore.”

I thought that was a good thing, until you told me you felt as if you had no more capacity for love.

“We should help each other,” you said.

Someday, I may end up charging for my advice. But last night, I gave it free.

Questions:-Initial thoughts?-Did the piece keep your interest?-How is the flow?-What did you think of the length?-Does the combination of past tense and present tense make sense? Is it confusing?-Any other comments or suggestions for improvement?

My first DD! Thank you so much thorns for featuring my work! And thanks to all the people who faved, commented and watched. I'll get back to you soon...hopefully.

What's been happening: I sent in all of my college apps on New Year's Eve I have my first college interview in two days I have three major assignments due this coming week but I got sick and I don't feel good so I don't feel like doing them I watched all episodes of Modern Family...it's hilarious I hope I get into college

Hello! Thank you so much for making a favorite out of my deviation "Remover!" That was a looong time ago, but I've been practically extinct from dA up until yesterday, and couldn't recall if I had thanked you...Better safe than sorry! Thanks a plenty, friend!

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